Why the Sharks? (Part I)

I get this one a lot, and I'm looking to warm this blog back up again in preparation for the season, so I think I'll post a little of what The New Yorker calls a "Personal History". It's a somewhat lengthy tale, so I'll break it into multiple parts...

I was born just outside of D.C. in northern Virginia, grew up in northern Wisconsin, and have lived in the Twin Cities for nearly all of the past nineteen years. How is it, then, that I became such a die-hard fan of a hockey team hailing from San Jose, of all places?

It's the "nearly all" in the previous paragraph that is key, for the small sliver of time between 1989 and the present that I did not spend in frosty Minnesota found me hanging my hat in California.

The autumn of 1993 was a pivotal time for the National Hockey League, the Sharks franchise, and myself. From the point of view of this hockey fan, the changes in the league were mostly baleful--the classy old conference and divisional monikers (Norris, Smythe, Patrick, and Adams Divisions, Prince of Wales and Clarence Campbell Conferences) were abandoned and replaced with vague references to North American geography, and my beloved North Stars were stolen from Minnesota and sent to Texas. On the other hand, there was a new and particularly curious team down in SoCal that piqued my interest called the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim (opinions vary, but I personally think their original logo rocked, and I lament its demise), and the Winnipeg Jets and Quebec Nordiques were still where they belonged, so it wasn't all bad.

The San Jose Sharks, at the forefront of the '90s wave of expansion (part of the "Original Twenty-Two", as we Sharks fans like to say) were entering their third year, and their first in their new building, San Jose Arena. At last the team was truly resident in the city of its appellation, having played in the Cow Palace (just outside of San Fransisco) for the first two years of its existence. In addition to their new building, the franchise possessed a new head coach (Kevin Constantine) and the fresh and painful memories of one of the worst seasons in NHL history (an 11-71-2 record in '92-'93, for a whopping 24 points--this was back when expansion teams actually had to suffer a little).

As for me, well, I finished college at the University of Minnesota that spring and had just been delivered, by a few kind friends of mine, to the campus of the Leland Stanford Junior University, thousands of miles from anyone I knew, to start grad school. Amongst my carload of possessions was a combination radio/black-and-white television with a five inch screen. I didn't anticipate using it much. As things turned out, I was wrong.

With the exception of a fellow mechanical engineering student down the hall from me in my dorm who was from Detroit ('nuff said--the Wings were as good then as they are now, and have pretty much maintained that level of play for every year in between), my new circle of Stanford friends were fans of scrimmage football, basketball, and baseball--in other words, they were fairly typical American sports fans. The fact that I was so devoted to hockey was curious and somewhat bemusing to them--they reacted largely as they would have if I had expressed deep interest in shinty or sepak takraw. One friend gave voice to this when I mentioned that I would value a national collegiate championship for the Minnesota Golden Gophers in ice hockey more than I would in basketball. The friend, a Duke alum and the type of college basketball fan who inspires this sort of thing, took a moment to convince himself that I was serious and exploded "Hockey? Who cares about hockey?"

At this point, though, despite loving the sport, I really had no team. The wounds left by the North Stars moving to Dallas were raw, and I did not know how, or even if, they would ever heal. I still cheered for the Gophers, of course, but I've always had a particular liking for the pro game.

Where, or where, was I to turn? For the answer to this and many other questions, see "Part II", coming soon.